Touching the City: Thoughts on Urban Scale - AD Primer

Foreword

Scaling the XXL

The essence of scale is that it is simultaneously finite and infinite. When we observe a building from the perspective of scale, we observe it as it is, embedded in its localised context. But we are also aware of the fact that at the lower end of the scale its details do not end with the doorknob, and that at the upper end of the scale it is part of a neighbourhood, a city, a country and a greater economic and political region.

In architecture and urbanism, scale thus oscillates between the tangible and the material on the one hand and the abstract and the conceptual on the other. Good design reflects this parallel (in-)finite quality, the relation between the scale of observation and the universe, and the relation between the detail and the overarching concept. Bad design is merely S, M, L, XL or even XXL!

Proportion plays a key role in this reciprocal reflection. When, as a continental European, I first saw English and American early 20th-century architecture, I asked myself why is it mediated by such a strong feeling of scale, until I realised that it was designed in feet and inches, whereas continental modernist buildings were designed using millimetres, centimetres and metres, which in its minutiae is proportionally dead. I then understood Le Corbusier’s urge to conceive the Modulor.

Billboard in Chelsea, New York, 2013Manhattan vacillates successfully ...